At Harbour View they shunted left at the roundabout and picked up the Rockfort Road, which slithered between the bay and the scrub-covered hills, a two-lane highway with a grassy median littered with gay pink flowers.

“You know what I like about this drive?” Ian said. “Although Kingston is so near … well, technically we are in Kingston … you don’t feel Kingston. I can’t explain it.”

They had just passed the cement factory and the flour mills.

“I know what you mean,” Fire replied. “I felt the same way when I returned. And after thinking about it I realized I wasn’t feeling Kingston, because it’s no longer a seaside town. It has evolved, y’know, like fish into amphibians, then reptiles, then mammals. Over the years it’s grown away from the docks to the hinterland, to the plains up into the hills.”

Ian didn’t quite understand what Fire meant. But as they discussed the city’s history, Fire pointed the wheels through the deep curve after the oil refinery, and it all became clear. The sea dived away from the land and the hills ran away from the road and the road collapsed its width, and suddenly the expansive Rockfort Road was the rowdy, crowded Windward Road, where goats loitered between overcrowded minibuses, and unemployed youths sat on broken fences, and old women sat on stools in shop piazzas hawking bad fruit and loose cigarettes, and men pushed homemade carts with stuff nobody wanted to buy, and reggae thundered from the speaker boxes set up outside record shops, and people crossed the street against the traffic lights, and the pungent smell of jerk chicken wafted from smoky pans set up in front of the kind of bars where the only mixed drink was rum and water, and the beautiful homes with their shingled roofs and hardwood floors had become ugly tenements, and the memory of the heady days of the sixties when a zoot-suited guy named Bob Marley used to croon at La Parisienne and the Bournemouth Baths, and Desmond Dekker and the Skatalites used to rule up de town had faded along with the hope for better days.

They pulled up to the curb and bought some chicken and a round of stout, then headed north, ascending in a steady incline toward prosperity past the stadium, a small bowl overlooked by grand villas on Beverly Hills, along Old Hope Road, past the old mansions converted to administrative use, up, up past the Sovereign Center, a Miami-style shopping mall where local kids ogle Benetton gear while fine-tuning the mores of the Jamdown mall rat, through the commercial bustle of Liguanea, where it seemed all vehicles were Mitsubishi Monteros or Honda Accords, past the botanical gardens and the two universities, up into the fern-draped foothills of the tall Blue Mountains, along a narrow road that wound along a river valley before forking off through hamlets and switching back across steep, green hillsides dotted with brightly painted houses that from a distance looked like plastic thumbtacks.